The Catholic Church in England and Wales has said gay people may make good parents but must still be banned from marriage.

Bishops have outlined their reasons why they believe same-sex couples should not be allowed to get married.

In
the document published in the Catholic Herald, it states: ‘We recognize
that many same-sex couples raise children in loving and caring homes.

‘Nevertheless,
marriage has an identity that at its core is distinct from any other
legally recognised relationship, no matter how much love or commitment
may be involved in these other relationships.‘Marriage has, over
the centuries, been the enduring public recognition of this commitment
to provide a stable institution for the care and protection of children,
and it has rightly been recognised as unique and worthy of legal
protection for this reason.

‘Marriage furthers the common good of
society because it promotes a unique relationship within which children
are conceived, born and reared, an institution that we believe benefits
children.’

The bishops also say refusing marriage to same-sex
couples is not discriminatory, as gay couples already have civil
partnerships.

Joseph Nicolosi, founder of ex-gay group NARTH and trainer of many other ex-gay therapists, is back with another brief article attempting to explain his perspective on the nature of homosexuality. Earlier this month,
he explained that his patients can get over their supposed “addiction”
to gay porn by simply making friends with more men. This week, he offers
a convoluted description of homosexual behavior as an addiction to
acting out a fantasy that compensates for a wounded gender identity:

Joyce
McDougall has investigated the central role of “theatre and
role-playing” in non-typical forms of sexual activity, including
homosexuality. She is among the few contemporary psychoanalysts willing
to study such forms of sexuality. McDougall understands “sexual
theatre” as an acting-out of intrapsychic sexual forces in a symbolic
attempt to resolve an identity conflict. In this regard she confirms the
classic psychoanalytic understanding of “perverse” (as the term was
used in previous years) sexual activity as being rooted in identity
confusion. Noting the repetitive-compulsive nature of these
role enactments, McDougall found that while her patients complain about
the constrained structure of these “erotic theatre pieces,” they could
not abstain from their enactments: “…and have to do it again and again
and again” (McDougall, 2000, p.182).

What Nicolosi is
trying to suggest is that gay people (and “the extreme case of
transsexuals”) were somehow sent the wrong messages by their parents
about how they are supposed to understand their own gender. This leads
to a sense of inner conflict that they then address through compulsively
trying to fulfill that “false” identity. Essentially, he thinks that
gay people are just actors cast in the wrong role who don’t know how
escape the performance because they believe they are trying to fix some
kind of “past trauma” by acting it out.

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service says so, and in this country, that's pretty much the final word.

The designation means a lot legally, but as a matter of objective fact it is neither a laurel nor a pejorative.

It
merely lumps Scientology in with all the other belief systems, from the
Big Three of monotheism, with their billions of followers and hundreds
of sub-sects, right down to self-proclaimed prophets seeking to found
new faiths.

To each his own gods and rituals. For those of us who
live wholly in the secular world, no religious doctrine is more or less
credible, or worthy of ridicule, than any other.

The law must look upon all religious belief with indifference, and does, at least in most Western nations.

But, after reading Lawrence Wright's searing new investigative book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, my usual indifference has given way to concern.

On second thought, make that fright. And not just about L. Ron Hubbard's secretive army of adherents.

Because
Wright's book demonstrates in granular detail what an organization with
enough money and zealous acolytes can do once it has wrapped itself in a
religious cloak: assault, conspire, burgle, forge, perjure, spy, bully
and intimidate anyone who gets in its way.

About 70 percent of Scout troops are sponsored by faith-based organizations. Many are threatening to break ties

The
Boy Scouts of America announced earlier this week that they are
considering an end to their decades-long ban on gay members, leaving it
to regional and local councils to dictate membership guidelines on
sexuality.

The news was met with cheers from scouts across the country
who have been banned from the organization after coming out, but many
conservative and religious leaders are angry about what they see as the
organization abandoning its long-standing commitment to biblical
principles.

“If that is what the leadership is doing, then I think
it will be a sad day in the life of the Boy Scouts of America,” Fred
Luter, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, told the
Baptist Press. “This is a tradition that so many of us across the
country grew up in. We were in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts in elementary
school, and this organization has always stood for biblical principles —
all the things that grounded our lives as a young kid growing up. To
now see this organization that I thought stood on biblical principles
about to give in to the politically correct thing is very
disappointing.”

About 70 percent of all Boy Scout troops are
sponsored by faith-based organizations, with the Southern Baptists,
Catholic Church, Lutheran Church, United Methodist Church and the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints representing the most troops, according to Fox News.

And many are suggesting they will break financial and membership ties with the organization if the policy goes through.

“Churches
of all faiths and denominations, including Southern Baptist churches,
will be forced to reevaluate whether they can, in good conscience,
continue to host Scout troops given that the Scouts appear poised to
turn their backs on this clear biblical and moral issue,” Roger Oldham,
spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention, said.

Politicians
across the political spectrum herald “job creation,” but frightfully
few of them talk about what kinds of jobs are being created. Yet this
clearly matters: According to the Census Bureau, one-third of adults who
live in poverty are working but do not earn enough to support
themselves and their families.

A quarter of jobs in America pay
below the federal poverty line for a family of four ($23,050). Not only
are many jobs low-wage, they are also temporary and insecure. Over the
last three years, the temp industry added more jobs in the United States
than any other, according to the American Staffing Association, the
trade group representing temp recruitment agencies, outsourcing
specialists and the like.

Low-wage, temporary jobs have become so
widespread that they threaten to become the norm. But for some reason
this isn’t causing a scandal. At least in the business press, we are
more likely to hear plaudits for “lean and mean” companies than angst
about the changing nature of work for ordinary Americans.

How did
we arrive at this state of affairs? Many argue that it was the
inevitable result of macroeconomic forces — globalization,
deindustrialization and technological change — beyond our political
control. Yet employers had (and have) choices. Rather than squeezing
workers, they could have invested in workers and boosted product
quality, taking what economists call the high road toward more advanced
manufacturing and skilled service work. But this hasn’t happened.
Instead, American employers have generally taken the low road: lowering
wages and cutting benefits, converting permanent employees into
part-time and contingent workers, busting unions and subcontracting and
outsourcing jobs. They have done so, in part, because of the
extraordinary evangelizing of the temp industry, which rose from humble
origins to become a global behemoth.

A
new report reveals a fact that too many Americans are familiar with
first-hand: nearly half of the nation's residents have no safety net to
protect them from falling into poverty in the event of a layoff or other
financial misfortune.

The recently published Assets & Opportunities Scorecard
from the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) shows that
"[n]early 44 percent of Americans don't have enough savings or other
liquid assets to stay out of poverty for more than three months if they
lose their income," as NPR summarized. At the same time, nearly a third of Americans live with no savings account at all.

The
nonprofit [CFED] tries to help low- and moderate-income families
achieve the American dream. The group's president, Andrea Levere, says
that's not easy when all your energy goes into paying the rent and
buying food.

"It's only when you have those basic needs satisfied
that you then can think, 'How do I make sure I have the best education
for my children? How do I make sure I have the skills I need to be more
competitive in the workplace?' " says Levere.

While New Yorkers anxiously await Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision on whether to lift the state’s de facto moratorium on high-volume slick-water horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,”
Woodstock, the iconic counter-culture capital of the world, has become
the first municipality to call for legislation to make fracking a Class C
felony.

Woodstock’s action is just one small town’s response to a
rapidly escalating global war over fracking. To both sides in this
war—environmentalists and citizens who oppose fracking on the one side
and the gas industry and its supporters on the other—the upcoming ruling
to allow or ban fracking in New York is being viewed as (you should
pardon the expression) a watershed event.

Decisions made in Albany and in towns like Woodstock
will likely determine whether fracking goes full steam ahead
everywhere, or whether its momentum can be slowed or even stopped. New
York, after all, has a rich history of environmental activism and
democratic movements, and anti-fracking activism has spread like
wildfire over the last couple of years. New York is also home to
abundant supplies of clean freshwater, an essential resource that is in
crisis globally and that could be endangered by the practice.

Fracking? Please Explain

On January 15, the Woodstock Town Board unanimously passed a resolution to petition New York State to introduce New York Public Law #1—which
would impose stiff penalties for fracking and related activities.
Before taking this step, the Woodstock Town Board took two others:
banning fracking within its borders and outlawing the use of frackwaste
fluid, some of which is known as “brine” (because of its heavy salt
content), on its roads. This material is used as a de-icing agent in the
winter and for dust control on dirt roads in the summer. Despite the
fact that brine from oil and gas wells (whether fracked or not) is laden
with heavy metals, toxic chemicals, and radioactivity, since 2008
the Department of Environmental Conservation has granted approval for
it to be spread on roads in the western part of the state.

New York Public Law #1 was conceived and drafted in May 2011 by the Sovereign People’s Action Network (SPAN) and FrackBusters NY—two citizen anti-fracking groups spearheaded by the late Richard Grossman,
a legal historian, democracy activist, and founder of a movement to ban
corporate personhood and strip corporations of their special legal
privileges.

In a recent Nationpiece, the wonderful Elizabeth Royte
teased out the direct links between hydraulic fracturing, or fracking,
and the food supply. In short, extracting natural gas from rock
formations by bombarding them with chemical-spiked fluid leaves behind
fouled water—and that fouled water can make it into the crops and
animals we eat.

But there's another, emerging food/fracking
connection that few are aware of. US agriculture is highly reliant on
synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, and nitrogen fertilizer is synthesized in
a process fueled by natural gas. As more and more of the US natural gas supply comes from fracking,
more and more of the nitrogen fertilizer farmers use will come from
fracked natural gas. If Big Ag becomes hooked on cheap fracked gas to
meet its fertilizer needs, then the fossil fuel industry will have
gained a powerful ally in its effort to steamroll regulation and fight back opposition to fracking projects.The
potential for the growth of fracked nitrogen (known as "N") fertilizer
is immense. During the 2000s, when conventional US natural gas sources
were drying up and prices were spiking, the US fertilizer industry
largely went offshore, moving operations to places like Trinidad and
Tobago, where conventional natural gas was still relatively plentiful.
(I told that story in a 2010 Grist piece.) This chart from a 2009 USDA doc illustrates how rapidly the US shifted away from domestically produced nitrogen in the 2000s.

Today,
Trinidad and Tobago, an island nation off the coast of Venezuela and
our leading source of imported N, is in the same position the US found
itself in the early 2000s: Its supply of conventional, easy-to-harvest
natural gas is wearing thin. In 2012, the International Monetary Fund estimated (PDF) that at current rates of extraction, the nation had sufficient natural gas reserves to last until just 2019.

[F]ederal
defense spending fell at an astounding 22.2 percent annual rate in the
quarter, which subtracted 1.28 percentage points from GDP growth. That
was in part a reversal from the unusual 12.9 percent gain in the third
quarter. But when the two quarters are averaged together, the defense
sector was a drag on the economy in the second half of 2012 — and that’s
before a “sequester” of automatic defense cuts goes into effect this
year if Congress doesn’t act to avert it.

That
“sequester” is the result of a poison pill that Congress administered to
itself. Last year, knowing full well that Congress couldn’t be trusted
to get anything done without some sort of threat hanging over its head,
Congress decided to force Congress to act, passing a bill that created
huge, automatic spending cuts unless Congress got its act together and
figured out a budget package. Well, Congress was not smart enough to
avoid Congress’ trap, so now those $1.2 trillion in budget cuts are
slated to go into effect.

At the end of 2012, the Pentagon saw those cuts looming; this week, it announced 46,000 layoffs. If the full weight of the cuts go into effect, the damage to the economy could be severe.

Washington -- In his inaugural address last Monday, President Obama made climate change a priority of his second term. It might be too late.

Within the lifetimes of today's children, scientists say, the climate could reach a state unknown in civilization.In
that time, global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels
are on track to exceed the limits that scientists believe could prevent
catastrophic warming. CO{-2} levels are higher than they have been in 15
million years.

The Arctic, melting rapidly and probably irreversibly, has reached a state that the Vikings would not recognize.

"We are poised right at the edge of some very major changes on Earth," said Anthony Barnosky,
a UC Berkeley professor of biology who studies the interaction of
climate change with population growth and land use. "We really are a
geological force that's changing the planet."

Wholesale shift needed

The
Arctic melt is occurring as the planet is just 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit
(0.8 degree Celsius) warmer than it was in preindustrial times.

At current trends, the Earth could warm by 4 degrees Celsius in 50 years, according to a November World Bank report.

The
coolest summer months would be much warmer than today's hottest summer
months, the report said. "The last time Earth was 4 degrees warmer than
it is now was about 14 million years ago," Barnosky said.

Cindy Joseph, a model, knew she was being subversive when she stopped tinting her long, loose waves more than a decade ago.

“Some people think that if you wear your silver hair long, you look like a witch or ‘that frumpy old hippie lady,'” she said.

But she and a significant cohort of graying Americans seem intent these days on proving otherwise.

Last
fall Ms. Joseph, still modeling at 60 but also now a blogger and
cosmetics entrepreneur, led a band of silver-haired marchers to Times
Square. It was a mini demonstration that she and Diana Jewell, a writer
and fellow organizer, called the Silver Sisters Strut. “We are the women
that we wished we would have had in our lives,” Ms. Joseph said, “if
they weren’t busy getting their hair dyed.”

In
a series of portraits by Vicki Topaz, a photographer based in San
Francisco, inveterate rule breakers like Susan Kim, 54, a boutique
owner, showily fans out her steel-colored hair, while Gloria Frynn, 60, a
college professor, runs her fingers through a mass of curls.

“Believe
me, these are women who have fun,” said Ms. Topaz, whose exhibition of
photographs, “Silver: a State of Mind,” is on view through February at
the Buck Institute for Research on Aging
in Novato, Calif., in Marin County. Reveling in their manes, she said,
“reflects their confidence, their ease with being who they are.”

Still,
wearing one’s gray hair long is viewed in some quarters as ill-advised.
If the cut is not precise, “you’re going to run the risk of looking
haggard,” warned Lisa Cicchini, a stylist in Manhattan. She nonetheless
finds herself frequently fielding questions from clients, she said,
about “where we can push the envelope.”

Flashmobs
in Mogadishu, marches in Bute and mass rallies in India: Eve Ensler on
the global response to her One Billion Rising campaign to end violence
against women

Since Eve Ensler
launched the One Billion Rising campaign to end violence against women
she has been repeatedly asked: is it a dance movement or overtly
political? A protest or a giant global celebration? Just a few weeks
before 14 February, the date that Ensler, activist and author of The
Vagina Monologues, designated the "day to rise", she says: "I've never
seen anything like it in my lifetime."

One in three women around
the world are subject to violence at some point in their life, a
statistic that prompted Ensler, who wrote the Monologues in 1996, to set
up One Billion Rising. With such violence encompassing domestic abuse,
gang rape, female genital mutilation and war, it is perhaps unsurprising
that the campaign has taken on a different hue in each of the 190
countries where events to mark 14 February are planned.

"It
is something that has gone across class, social group and religion.
It's like a huge feminist tsunami," she said on a stopover in Paris.

Local protests range from the first ever flashmob in Mogadishu, Somalia, to the town square in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute
and encompass Maori women in New Zealand and an estimated 25m
protesters in Bangladesh. Ensler's idea for One Billion Rising came from
her work in the Congo, where she set up the City of Joy to
help female victims of violence and where she plans to be on 14
February itself, a day chosen partly to take back the idea of love from
the soppy commercialism of Valentine's Day. Her last stop before Congo
will be London, with a sold-out event at the Café de Paris including Thandie Newton and other campaigners.

Ensler
says a combination of social media and the world's grassroots feminist
movements have driven the way the campaign has taken off globally. In
south Asia for three weeks over Christmas, she was struck by how much
the horror over the gang rape of the 23-year-old medical student Jyoti
Singh in Delhi had given impetus to the campaign. "In India, One Billion Rising is at the centre of the biggest breakthrough in sexual violence ever seen," she says.

The Conference Board reported Tuesday that the preliminary January figure for consumer confidence in the United States fell to its lowest level in more than a year.

The last time consumers were this bummed out was October 2011, when there was widespread talk of a double-dip recession.

But this time business news is buoyant. The stock market is bullish. The housing market seems to have rebounded a bit.

So why are consumers so glum?

Because they’re deeply worried about their jobs and their incomes – as they have every right to be.The
job situation is still lousy. We’ll know more this coming Friday about
what happened to jobs in January. But we know over 20 million people are
still unemployed or underemployed.

Personal income is in terrible shape. The median wage continues to drop, adjusted for inflation.

Most
people can’t get readily-available loans because banks are still
cautious about lending to anyone without a sterling credit history.
(Eliminate student loans and you find Americans aren’t borrowing any
more than they were a year ago.)

And the payroll tax hike has
reduced paychecks for the typical American by about $100 a month. That’s
just about what the typical family spends to fill up their gas tanks
per month. Or half what they spend for groceries each week.

by Paul BuchheitPublished on Monday, January 28, 2013 by Common DreamsIf
asked why we live in a great country, an American is likely to respond:
"Because we are free." Fortunately for the respondent, explanation is
rarely required. Freedom is difficult to define, and today it seems to
exist more in our minds than in reality. In a 1941 Message to
Congress Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to explain what it means to be
free. He outlined the "four essential human freedoms":

The first is freedom of speech and expression... The second is freedom of every person to worship... The third is freedom from want... The fourth is freedom from fear.

The 2013 version shows how our freedoms have been diminished, or corrupted into totally different forms.Freedom from Want? Poverty Keeps Getting Worse. For every three people in poverty in the year 2000, there are now four. Almost 50 million people were impoverished in 2011. Over 20 percent of our children live in poverty, including almost half of young black children. Among industrialized countries only Romania has a higher child poverty rate than the United States. It goes well beyond economics. Not long after the FDR era, in 1960, the U.S. ranked near the top among 34 OECD countries in Life Expectancy and Infant Mortality. By 2008 we were close to the bottom. A 2007 UNICEF report ranked us last among 21 OECD nations in an assessment of child health and safety. Freedom from Want has been least attainable for people of color. For every $100 owned by a white family, a black family has $2. For every $100 owned by a single white woman, a single black or Hispanic woman has 25 cents.

Conservatives are not happy. Despite their best efforts, the public continues to give Social Security a big thumbs up, and the President has just launched his second term with a speech hailing the program as a force that strengthens America.

You
can understand their frustration. They’ve tried so very hard to make
Americans think that we cannot afford to treat sick, disabled and
elderly people with dignity while we subsidize the rich and fight
unnecessary wars. But the public hasn't bought their solvency
fabrications. And we haven’t been fooled by various pretenses for
cutting, from the “chained CPI” adjustment to extending the retirement age again. Even the means-testing ruse, cloaked as sensitivity to the poor but intended to drain public support for the program, hasn’t worked out for them so far.

Conservatives
still hate Social Security. Since the day the program was passed under
Franklin Roosevelt, the greedy rich who don’t want to pay taxes and the
financiers who want to stick Americans with private retirement accounts
on which they can charge fees continue to invent new ways to attack and
discredit the country's best-loved program. The think-tank minions and
PR units attached to these Scrooges keep themselves up at night
imagining new ways to dupe the public into accepting grotesque economic
inequality as the norm and a downgraded future as the price we must pay
for Wall Street greed.

Now the Social Security haters are taking a
page from the Welfare Queen smear campaign book of the ‘90s to conjure a
new scapegoat for all that is wrong with America: the Disability King.
According to this meme, the problem with America’s economy and society
is vast numbers of lazy, lying, good-for-nothing loafers cheating the
American taxpayer through disability fraud.

The
United States is in the midst of the most protracted unemployment
crisis in modern history, and for vast segments of the population, the
recession has never ended. Wages are still sinking; more than 20 million
people are in need of full-time work. Yet, the national debate is
fixated on fixing the debt rather than fixing the economy.

This is
“austerity” economics, which demands cuts in government spending in the
belief that this will reduce government deficits, even as it costs jobs
and imposes hardships on people.

Mass unemployment, declining
wages, and faltering growth suggests the United States has already
suffered too much austerity, too soon. And yet the political debate is
focused on how much more to impose.

Washington imposed $1.5 trillion in
spending cuts over 10 years in the 2011 “debt ceiling” deal. Washington
stumbled past the year-end “fiscal cliff” with a deal that featured
about $600 billion in tax hikes over ten years, including returning
rates for the richest Americans back to Clinton era levels, and ending
the payroll tax holiday, adding 2 percent to every working family’s
payroll tax rate.

Now Congress has created an even more precarious
fiscal peril to extort even greater cuts. Between now and the middle of
May, we’ll hit the debt ceiling again, the automatic cut (sequester) of
military and domestic budgets for the remainder of the year will kick
in, and the temporary appropriations for government will expire. This
sets up a new negotiation to forestall these ruinous calamities, now
with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid directly targeted.

The
leaders of both parties suggest that more deficit reduction is needed
and that it would help the economy. Not surprisingly, polls suggest that
most Americans believe that cutting spending will help the economy, not
harm the recovery. The reality is that spending is not out of control,
the deficit is already plummeting, and we should be focused on fixing
the economy to make it work for working people, not on austerity driven
by wrong-headed deficit hysteria.

Shakespeare’s
Polonius offered this classic advice to his son: “neither a borrower
nor a lender be.” Many of our nation’s Founding Fathers emphatically
saw it otherwise. They often lived by the maxim: always a borrower,
never a lender be. As tobacco and rice planters, slave traders, and
merchants, as well as land and currency speculators, they depended upon
long lines of credit to finance their livelihoods and splendid ways of
life. So, too, in those days, did shopkeepers, tradesmen, artisans, and
farmers, as well as casual laborers and sailors. Without debt, the
seedlings of a commercial economy could never have grown to maturity.

Ben
Franklin, however, was wary on the subject. “Rather go to bed
supperless than rise in debt” was his warning, and even now his
cautionary words carry great moral weight. We worry about debt, yet we
can’t live without it.

Debt remains, as it long has been, the Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of capitalism. For a small minority, it’s a
blessing; for others a curse. For some the moral burden of carrying
debt is a heavy one, and no one lets them forget it. For privileged
others, debt bears no moral baggage at all, presents itself as an
opportunity to prosper, and if things go wrong can be dumped without a
qualm.

Those who view debt with a smiley face as the royal road to
wealth accumulation and tend to be forgiven if their default is large
enough almost invariably come from the top rungs of the economic
hierarchy. Then there are the rest of us, who get scolded for our
impecunious ways, foreclosed upon and dispossessed, leaving behind scars
that never fade away and wounds that disable our futures.

Think
of this upstairs-downstairs class calculus as the politics of debt.
British economist John Maynard Keynes put it like this: “If I owe you a
pound, I have a problem; but if I owe you a million, the problem is
yours.”

After months of an impending “debtpocalypse,”
the dreaded “debt ceiling,” and the “fiscal cliff,” Americans remain
preoccupied with debt, public and private. Austerity is what we’re
promised for our sins. Millions are drowning, or have already drowned,
in a sea of debt -- mortgages gone bad, student loans that may
never be paid off, spiraling credit card bills, car loans, payday loans,
and a menagerie of new-fangled financial mechanisms cooked up by the
country’s “financial engineers” to milk what’s left of the American
standard of living.Continue reading at: http://indypendent.org/2013/01/29/politics-debt-america-debtor%E2%80%99s-prison-debtor-nation

For more than a decade before Hurricane Sandy, oceanography professor Malcolm Bowman, head of the Storm Surge Research Group
at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, warned that a
superstorm would someday drown New York City. There were plenty of
precedents, he noted, such as the 1992 nor’easter that crippled train
lines and Tropical Storm Floyd in 1999, which dumped a foot of rain in 24 hours and caused flash flooding.

“My
middle name is Noah,” laughs Bowman, who looks the part of an old salt,
with a tanned complexion and trimmed white beard. “The flood’s coming,
you better build the ark, get everybody aboard.”In 2008, Bowman was asked to join Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New York City Panel on Climate Change, and he recommended
that the city build surge barriers like those protecting London and the
Netherlands. But his advice wasn’t heeded. According to Bowman, “the
panel thought that it was too ambitious, too expensive, too futuristic.”

Now, in the aftermath of the most devastating storm New York has ever seen—one that claimed more than 100 lives in the region, destroyed thousands of homes and businesses, and notched a record storm surge of 13.8 feet in Lower Manhattan—an idea that was once seen as implausible now seems inevitable. One poll found that 80 percent of the public favors fortifying the city with surge barriers. “Money shouldn’t be a problem,” declared the New York Times. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has thrown his weight behind barriers, as have the state’s top Congress members and New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the frontrunner in this year’s mayoral contest.

Bowman
and his Storm Surge Research Group have sketched out a plan that could
cost an estimated $25 billion and centers on a five-mile-long “Outer Harbor Gateway”
between Sandy Hook, New Jersey and the Rockaway peninsula. The barrier
would be a belt of landfill, stone and reinforced concrete, possibly
topped with a highway that would provide an alternate route from the
mid-Atlantic to New England. Thirty-foot-high sand berms would be piled
on Sandy Hook and the Rockaways to prevent flood waters from
circumventing the gateway. Another gate, this one a mile long, would be
built in the upper East River to stop surges coming in from the Long
Island Sound to the north.

Anti-whaling
activist group Sea Shepherd said Wednesday it had intercepted the
Japanese fleet in its annual Southern Ocean hunt “before a single
harpoon has been fired”.

Sea Shepherd claims to have saved the
lives of 4,000 whales over the past eight whaling seasons with
ever-greater campaigns of harassment against the Japanese harpoon fleet.

The
militant environmentalist group said the Brigitte Bardot, a former
ocean racer, had intercepted the harpoon ship Yushin Maru No. 3 in the
Southern Ocean at a relatively northern latitude.

“Given that the
large concentrations of whales are found further south, closer to the
Antarctic continent where there are high concentrations of krill, this
would indicate that they have not yet begun whaling,” said Brigitte
Bardot captain Jean Yves Terlain.

Former Australian politician Bob
Brown, who assumed leadership of the anti-whaling campaign from
fugitive Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson due to legal issues earlier
this month, said it was welcome news.

“It is likely that we have intercepted these whale poachers before a single harpoon has been fired,” said Brown.

If
I were Rory Albanese's sister (or his sister's girlfriend), I'd have
been furious. On Saturday night I went to see Albanese and his Daily Show co-stalwart Adam Lowitt at their inauguration-themed comedy show at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C., but amid the political wit, not one but both
of them used their professed support of equal marriage as a springboard
to make jokes about how lesbians are ugly.

Lowitt was first up, saying
that while lesbians sound hot in theory, when you meet them in real life
they're ugly and look like men; Albanese followed up this gem by
telling us his that sister is gay and that his sister's girlfriend has
the same name as his own girlfriend -- but that there's no way he could
mix them up, because his sister's girlfriend looks like a man.

The
audience, being encouraged (twice) to laugh at the alleged "ugliness"
of lesbians, mainly did so uncomfortably, and I sat amongst them feeling
offended -- and wondering whether it was appropriate for me to feel
offended. Was I being overly touchy? Politically correct? Is being gay
such a non-issue now that it's ripe for this sort of treatment by
Emmy-winning comedians? I don't think so. Last week's awkward coming out
by Jodie Foster
underlines that -- even as she received a lifetime achievement award at
the Golden Globes, she struggled to deliver the simple and prosaic
information that she is attracted to women, and the Internet has
bombarded us with editorials and blogs analyzing her words ever since.
Actual or perceived sexual identity remains prime bullying and
discrimination material. This isn't the face of a non-issue. Coming out,
or being identified as gay, is still far from business as usual.

Furthermore,
generalized, derogatory comments about lesbians' looks are clearly not
OK. Last year Florida Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll told reporters that she
couldn't possibly have engaged in homosexual acts because she didn't look like a lesbian.
This ridiculous statement spawned a huge furor and a social media
campaign, "This Is What a Lesbian Looks Like," that saw lesbians posting
photos of themselves to demonstrate that, just like anyone else,
lesbians come in all shapes, sizes and styles. People were upset because
she was pigeonholing a huge group of people and essentially fanning
prejudice and stigmatizing lesbians for being different. And that's what
these two men did in their comedy show: They tried to indoctrinate
their audiences, through the use of humor, in the idea that lesbians are
ugly. And just as it wasn't OK for Carroll to promote and seek
society's complicity in this sort of judgmental prejudice, it isn't OK
for them.

Perhaps if the comedians and audience had been lesbians
poking fun at themselves, I might have felt differently, but these jokes
were overtly "laughing at" rather than "laughing with." And for me,
that just feels inappropriate, and not just inappropriate but crass,
pathetic, insulting, and damaging to everyone.

Kochel,
a longtime GOP strategist in the state, said his stance was informed by
his children, one of whom is a high school senior and one a college
student.

“When they talk to me about what they care about and what
their counterparts in school are talking about, it’s not gay marriage
and it’s not abortion and birth control,” he said. “Those are largely
settled issues for young voters. And so, I think we’ve got to move past
it.”

Romney’s own stance on the issue shifted slightly during his campaign. As The Advocate reported
in October 2012, a campaign spokesperson said that while the former
Massachusetts governor pledged in writing to support the Defense of
Marriage Act and a constitutional amendment defining marriage as being
between a man and a woman, he did believe that states had the right to
define their own rules regarding same-sex partners’ access to adoption
and hospital visitation rights.

From Addicting Info: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/01/28/chris-christie-vetoes-minimum-wage-bill-over-25/Lorraine Devon Wilke2013/01/28Oh,
Chris Christie, you feisty New Jersey truth-teller who eschews partisan
politics in lieu of street savvy solutions! We loved it when you fought
for the little guy before, during, and after Hurricane Sandy. There was
something noble about your embrace of Obama while collaborating to get
things done during that rough patch. How refreshing has it been to watch
a real politician put people over demagoguery, truth over party line, and personal principles over pontification.

So, tell me, why is
a $1.25/per hour raise to the minimum wage veto-worthy? And why, when
you had a minute to think about, did it seem that lowering it by one
quarter, 25¢/per hour, was doable? I guess going all the way
up to the staggering $8.50, instead of the current $7.25, was just too
big of a leap, yeah? But go with $8.25, bring you that 25¢ decrease on a
platter, and you’re ready to go?

One New Jersey governor knocked off his pedestal.

Who
in this life and times thinks even $8.50/per hour represents anything
more than the most basic – most “minimum” – of wages? Yes, anyone who’s
desperate for a job, anyone who needs income regardless of the rate,
would gladly accept that amount; but any businessperson, anyone who’s
been part of the working world and is older than the age of 15,
understands that this is exactly what it’s called: minimum wage. The lowest you can go. It’s not a good wage, it’s a minimum wage.

So as a father of four, a man of the streets, a guy who knows what it’s like for people out there in the real world, how does Christie justify squabbling over 25¢?

According to SFGate, Christie hit the January 28th deadline affixed to the bill and activated a “conditional veto,” returning the bill to lawmakers with his conditions:

Christie’s
conditional veto returns the bill with the suggestion that lawmakers
scale back the increase by 25 cents, to $1 per hour and phase it in over
three years in increments of 25 cents the first year, 50 cents the
second year and 25 cents the third year. Christie also rejected the idea
of implementing automatic annual adjustments while encouraging the
Democratic-led Legislature to restore a tax credit to the working poor.

Shortly
after Christie trumpeted his pension fix, the New Jersey Star Ledger noted that liabilities
would spike again after the stopgap measures petered out, warning,
“because the state won’t be making full pension payments, the gap will
swell again to $58 billion by 2019, according to the state’s estimates.”

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson